Unable to communicate with friends or receive anonymous Facebook tips about happenings in the U.S. legal community to post on Above the Law, Lat wrote in the Observer column that he became increasingly depressed. Despite his legal training, he was unable to figure out what he might have done to deserve such draconian punishment by Facebook’s administrators. (He now realizes that he apparently violated the social networking site’s terms of use by including portions of another user’s Facebook profile on his law blog, and he promises that he will never make such a mistake again.)

“The irony, of course,” he writes, “is that, as The New York Times reported last month, users who actually do want to leave Facebook were finding it nearly impossible to erase themselves completely from the site.”